I'm just wondering how old people are on here, cos the majority of you seem to be ace.
You see, I've never come close to the Jackpot on any game and so I conveniently blame it on being a young 21
My best single payout is £6 on Hangman's Haunted House, £5 on Pub Quiz, and £5 on Nuts.
Will I join you lot on JP row when I hit, say, my 30s?!
Post your age please (and perhaps in parenthesis the age you were when you first achieved Jackpotage).
I'm 29. I wouldn't call myself an ace, more of a jack.
But don't be too despondent about not winning any jackpots, most of the games you play nowadays are practically impossible to win the jackpot on. In days of yore, quiz machines were stand-alone efforts and many many games were jackpottable (with the right amount of skill of course). They also seemed to have much higher jackpots in some cases.
Why was that? Is there any sort of legislation which governs the size of quiz machine payouts?
I'm 38 and first hit a Jackpot when I was 17 (at 6th Form College) on a game that only QuizMaster would remember the name of - Treasure Chest or something similar. The Jackpot was 'only' £10 (still good money then) but by memory you only had to answer about 10 questions to get there - most of the time the prize you got to was either £1 or £2 and I just got lucky in being offered a £10 prize. This was actually the first time I had ever seen/played a quiz machine so you can imagine why I got hooked so early!
As the good Cardinal makes clear though, I wouldn't get too downhearted with the fact that you can't seem to be able to get a Jackpot now. Most games are to all intents and purposes programmed never to pay out more than a few quid, and of the ones that can be Jackpotted they are virtually all now set to pay out just once to someone and then never again. Games in the 'good old days' would go through a cycle of Payout/Take In/Payout so as long as there were enough punters prepared to play a machine, the Jackpot would always become achievable again at some point.
As cool explains in another thread, the multi-game machines have been one major reason for this - in that punters' money gets spread out across a lot more games than on a standalone - but for me the more important reason is simply that games are being programmed deliberately to not allow big prizes to become achievable.
As for the Cardinal's question, the difference is not the size of the Jackpots - £40 has been the limit for some time now * - it is the fact that in the past the Jackpots were realistic and achievable whereas now in most cases you would have more chance of pushing blancmange up a mountain.
* I've only ever seen two variations to this, both on Millionaire - a rare standalone where the Jackpot would start at £40 then increase from there and a linked set of three machines that I saw in a few arcades where there was a notional Jackpot of several hundred pounds - not sure if this was ever won by anyone though.
I'm 28. My first jackpot would've been at age 18 or 19 on the old JPM Monopoly machine in my college bar, through collecting the dark blue set. Them were the days. I too wouldn't worry too much about not JPing modern machines - the best that can really be hoped for at the moment is to win money, but the really big prizes are always unlikely. My tip might be to try to play games like Trivia for Dummies or Pub Quiz where, if it is in the mood, the JP should be perfectly achieveable; that said I've not managed to JP Pub Quiz myself yet. I'd also note that practice does make perfect - I've been playing machines a lot for ten years now, and doing all sorts of quizzes for longer than that. I see machines as part of my wider interest in quizzes rather than an entirely separate interest in itself. It's hard work.
i'm 28 too. first JP was a flukey £40 from £1 stake cluedo on the 3rd room when i was 16 or 17.
most recent JP was WU
(would have been WC yesterday but i gambled the £15 with 18 seconds left and missed JP by about 2 seconds)
most recent JP apart from WU or WC was C&R
but as others have said there are few strictly Q&A games which will allow JP without a deal of luck and/or exceptional knowledge.
as for the skill (not knowledge) games, there are chances to get JPs here if you are good and catch the machine at the right time. without bragging, i would expect to get the WU JP (or at least the £6) in a virgin pub within four goes.
i also had some of the national prizes of £100 from when halfwitboxes had national tournaments.
Hangmanfan wrote:
My best single payout is £6 on Hangman's Haunted House, £5 on Pub Quiz, and £5 on Nuts.
To be honest thats not bad going for those 3 games, can't say I've done any better on those games but I have had £10 out of Trivia for Dummies (JP), £10 from Deal or No Deal and £20 from the old cluedo.
I'm 22 and sound like a similar standard to you so maybe we need that extra 5-10 years experience to learn more stuff and join the elite.
In terms of jackpots its just a question of playing the right game at the right time.
Cardinal Richelieu wrote:That Monopoly one was a beaut (although to be pedantic £10 wasn't the jackpot).
Good point - do you know was it possible to collect every set with a theoretical £30 (or whatever) JP? My first true JP in that case was probably either £20 on JPM's Cluedo or £20 on Maygay's Guinness Book of Records.
Cardinal Richelieu wrote:Ah, I didn't know that. Although all the sets together, including the stations and utilities, would be £45....
Most I ever got was £12.
I have this feeling a mate of mine once got two sets for either £(8+6) or £(8+4). I suspect the £45 maximum was theoretically attainable, although I'd be impressed if anyone had got much more than £14 from old Monopoly, to be honest.
